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A
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B
I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome back to the to the Contrary podcast. You're gonna have to bear with me for a moment. We're gonna be talking about free speech and whether or not we're about to see the end of intern. And no, we're not okay with that. We're gonna be talking with Sarah McLaughlin, but as Ann Applebaum pointed out, this was one of the strangest weeks we've ever had, even by the standards of the weird times that we live in. I mean, it started off last weekend on Easter Sunday, with the President of the United States dropping an F bomb on Easter Sunday, threatening the crazy bastards of Iran. A lot of us thought that that was perhaps one of the most deranged tweets ever issued by a President of the United States. And then Donald Trump said, hold my beer. The very next day, he threatened the death of whole civilizations. The President of the United States threatening the death of civilizations. We know how that turned out. That, of course, was followed by Taco Tuesday, which really wasn't a taco event. It was more like a complete strategic failure, followed up by kind of a series of cluster, you know, what's. As the ceasefire didn't really hold. It's not clear what was in the detail, whether there was a deal, whether there was an agreement, whether or not it's just guys throwing spaghetti up against the wall. So we live in a land of confusion. And in many ways, it seemed appropriate that the foggiest of wars would end up in the foggiest of sort of cease fires. But that was really only part of the week. I mean, you have to take notes here. What was the strangest story? Melania Trump comes out on Thursday and issues that, you know me thinks she protests a lot. I had nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. I hardly knew Jeffrey Epstein. We went to parties. You know, those, those emails between me and Ghislaine Maxwell, they were inconsequential. But she did, she did call for congressional hearings with the victims, which strikes me as very much off message for an administration that just a couple of days ago had said, Todd Blanche, the acting Attorney General, said, yeah, we're kind of done. We're closing the files on the Epstein case. And remember, his predecessor, Pam Bondi, would not even turn around and look at the survivors when they were at that Senate hearing. And yet we haven't really gotten to one of the strangest stories of the week yet, which was this report that the Pentagon actually tried to threaten the Pope, threatening the Bishop of Rome with the, what, 14th century Avignon Papacy, where the French king uses military force to basically set up a rival pope immediately. Really, really bizarre. By the way, it did not work. As you can tell, the Pope is not backing off on his criticism. But as an example of the incredible thuggish arrogance of the Trump administration, thinking that they could browbeat the Catholic Church. And by the way, put this in the context of all the complaints about the war on Christianity, the war on the church, and all of the religious trappings around this war, just for a mental experiment, try to imagine if it had been President Obama or President Biden or President Trump, Kamala Harris, who'd called in a leader of the evangelical church or somebody from the evangelical churches and tried to bully them and said, you know, you need to get on board. Our military is so powerful, we can kill anybody in the world. We can do anything we want. You better get on the board. Otherwise we're going to. I don't know what the threat would be on the right. The explosion would have been radioactive. What else do we have here? Donald Trump continues to berate NATO even though we have more and more evidence that it is Russia that is helping the Iranians. And there's no talk of sanctions. Meanwhile, JD Vance is spending his week campaigning for Victor Orban, Viktor Orban, who is the thuggish autocrat from Hungary who's up for reelection. Actually, there are some suggestions that J.D. vance's visit to Hungary may have made it more likely that Orban will be ousted. By the way, this trip comes as we get all of these reports that Orban's government had been very much aligned with Iran after Israel used those pagers to blow up some of the leaders of Hezbollah. You had Hungarian officials call Iran and say, whatever we can do to help you, we'll do that. Awkward. Meanwhile, another report that essentially Viktor Orban had told Vladimir Putin, I will be your poodle. I will do whatever you want. I will be your mini me. And there's J.D. vance standing shoulder to shoulder with Viktor Orban. By the way, how does this sort of jive with the whole America first, with all the things going on in the world, that J.D. vance is spending the week in Hungary, meanwhile. And by the way, if you want to get my full rant on this, and it is a full rant, although I kind of was a little bit restrained, it won't feel that way. This is the weekend of the White House Correspondents Dinner, and they are inviting as their honored guest President Donald Trump, who is waging this aggressive and vicious war against the press and against the First Amendment. Apparently, CBS News is also inviting Pete Hegseth, the guy who actually kicked the press out of the Pentagon. Now, this is embarrassing in many ways for the White House correspondents to, you know, be hobnobbing with members of the Trump administration while they are trying to destroy the First Amendment. So they came up with this idea to put lipstick on their appeasement. And I'm not making this up. They've actually designed these little pocket squares and tote bags and little wallets and pins with the wording of the First Amendment, as if somehow that is speaking truth to power. So it used to be that the media was the Fourth estate that would stand up and speak out, and now it's tote bags and pocket squares. And it's so pathetic, it is so embarrassing. They think of it as subversive. I think that they are beclowning themselves. And I'll have more to say about that a little bit later. Okay? And meanwhile, for those of you who are keeping track of all of that, the work on the Ballroom continues while all of this is going on. And some of you may be old enough to remember when Donald Trump went to Pennsylvania and said, I am going to be the most pro American steel president ever. We are going to bring American steel back. Well, guess what? He's taking donated steel from a foreign country, from a European country, which is, you know, apparently given him contributions and in return has gotten special tariff relief. The corruption is so open, the corruption is so blatant that it's hard to keep up with it. I struggle to do it because in any given week, it's kind of easy to move on and say, well, you know, among the major stories of the week, there was a. And then forget the fact that we have a president whose corruption is blatant. And meanwhile, and again, as I said on television the other night, you know, I push back against irrational exuberance about reports of the MAGA crackup. We've heard this over and over and over again. You know, look, are there cracks in the base? And let's be honest about it, we haven't seen those cracks in the polls. But holy crap, what's been happening over the last couple of days is remarkable. After Melania came out and gave her statement about Epstein, which, again, we don't know whether she went rogue, we don't know what Donald Trump's reaction in private was. Although, wouldn't you have loved to have been a fly on the wall in the White House after that? That took. That took place. But we do know what Donald Trump was doing in public, and he's really putting off one social media truth social post after another attacking Iran, attacking, well, just pretty much everybody, but including. And the one that I think is worthy of at least a little bit of note is he went on this long, long rant. And by the way, I actually think that he probably wrote it himself, going after some of his MAGA BFFs or former Best friends, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, Alex Jones, some of whom are complete nut jobs. But it is interesting. He goes off and he says, I know why Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens and Alex Jones have been fighting me for years, which they haven't. They've been carrying water for you. They have one thing in common, low IQs. They're stupid people. They know what, their families know it and everybody else knows it too. So does this mean there's a MAGA crack up? Not necessarily. I mean, let's slow roll this. We don't want to get too far out, but we are seeing at least some hesitations, some doubts. If you're hearing some of these folks, you know, what Donald Trump is doing sounds insane. I mean, we are at a position right now where think about this moment in history where Marjorie Taylor Greene is saying that Donald Trump is too insane for her. Just get your head around all of that. If only they had been warned. So, you know, again, is the mega base breaking with Donald Trump? No, but there's some hesitancy, there's some doubts. And something else that is happening that has not happened before is the mega base is hearing this. They're hearing this criticism that is coming from, you know, many of the trusted influencers. There was a very interesting report in the New York Times. Actually, this is one where I thought this was a flagrant act of journalism. They went into the comment section of Truth Social, and these are the MAGA true believers. And they made sure they weren't looking at the bots. And what they found were hundreds, if not thousands of people who had been 100% behind Donald Trump, who were going, WTF? What are you doing with Iran? You know, on the one hand, you told us you weren't gonna get into these wars. At least we had one group of maga, and now we're upset about this. On the other hand, there are the people who are saying, we need you to fight until the end and get the job done. And apparently Donald Trump is not going to do that. We don't know. So watch this space, because something's happening. What it is is not exactly clear. So we come to the end of an amazingly strange week knowing that probably next week will be stranger. But one of the things that I think we need to continually focus on is how fragile are many of the things that we have taken for granted. I mean, one of the things we've learned is how fragile these institutions are, how fragile these values are, how fragile the principles of people who claim to be principled conservatives, how solid that is, but also how much support is there really in this country and globally for things that I think we've taken for granted. You know, a couple of years ago, I think it was easy to take for granted that we valued free speech. When we talked about American freedom, we were talking about The First Amendment. Are we still talking about that? Do people really understand why free speech is so important? Well, that's one of the things that I want to dive into in this weekend's podcast. So let's get to it. And joining me for our weekend podcast, Sarah McLaughlin from Fire has returned. And Fire stands for it is the foundation for individual rights and expression. I want to make sure I get that right. Is that correct?
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E
That is correct.
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B
And the last time we had you on, we were talking about your new book, Authoritarians in the Academy, how the Internationalization of Higher education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech. And I guess that's what I want to talk about, is that we have been, and I think maybe the last few years have been kind of this, maybe the culture shock of realizing that many of the things that we've taken for granted, like the First Amendment and free speech, you know, maybe are not necessarily given. And also what you have been writing about has been what's happening all around the world pushing back on free speech and the way in which that might affect us. So let me just tell you what really caught my eye that you wrote this week. It's the end of Internet anonymity as we know it, and I don't feel fine. And you talk about a proposal in Turkey that's kind of extreme. But let's talk about this, because this is one of those things where. And again, you know, with everything going on in the world, I want people to know that we can walk and chew gum at the same time. And especially as you see the United States cozying up to some of these authoritarian regimes, what happens over there does not necessarily stay over there. So talk to me a little bit about what is happening in Turkey and why we should care about it at all.
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E
Sure. So. Well, first, let me set the stage a little bit, because I have been writing about Turkey for a long time because I think Turkey's president, a lot of people might not know about this, but he is one of the thinnest skinned people I have ever been aware of on this planet. Yes, President Erdogan. So it's against the law in Turkey to insult the president. And there have been multiple trials alone over people comparing Erdogan to Gollum from Lord of the Rings in memes. That has alone led to a number of trials. Thousands of people have been prosecuted for insulting the president, children included. Children have been prosecuted for insulting the president of Turkey. Anyways, that's just a quick setting of the stage so you understand why people might want to speak Anonymously in Turkey. I think they have a few good reasons. But what Turkey has been doing, you know, this is a long running thing. They have been going after social media companies for decades at this point, trying to get them to censor speech that's critical of the government, challenges the government. And what they're rolling out recently is a new proposal that they're going to send to parliament that will have social media companies require people to submit their national ID number in association with their social media accounts. So, you know, your social media accounts, you know, say you have, you know, string of numbers, string of letters. It's meant to be anonymous. It's not clear who you are. It'll be clear to the government who you are. They will have, you know, a clear connection with social media companies. So your identity is firmly connected to whatever social media accounts you're using, perhaps to criticize the government, perhaps to make jokes about the president of Turkey. So the goal there is to streamline an already very oppressive system to make sure that people aren't allowed to have any protection whatsoever when they talk about their government on the Internet. And I'm pretty freaked out about that, hence my headline. And I don't feel fine. And part of the reason why is a, this is scary. Just for the people of Turkey. This is bad sign for them. They have been in a long despotic decline in Turkey and it's not going to get any better under this proposal. By the way, they said that social media companies are already complying with this. We don't know which companies exactly, we don't know exactly what terms they're complying with, but they're sending the message that this is already underway and that, you know, social media companies are going to play along. Maybe that's not entirely honest. We don't know. But you know, there's a few reasons why we need to worry. It's not just about Turkey. Number one, if you've been paying at all attention to what's been happening with tech policy and tech regulations, we are just in a world of every government looking over the fence to see what the neighbors doing. These are just spreading across borders like wildfire. I would not be surprised to see more countries explicitly say, you know what, we also don't like anonymity. And people might look at Turkey and they say, okay, Turkey's an authoritarian country. Are you really that surprised? But what they might not realize is just a few weeks ago, Germany's chancellor said he also wants to see an end to online anonymity.
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B
I want to see real names on the Internet. I want to know who is speaking. And as you point out, not coincidentally, Germany also prosecutes insults to public officials, which I was not aware of that apparently police investigated a Facebook comment calling the Chancellor of Germany Pinocchio. So this is very, very attractive to people in power to not have. Okay, what is the. There is a rationale, right? They come up and they say this will protect us against Internet crime, right. So that people can't protect, pretend to be somebody else. And the big one, of course, which is not totally illegitimate. We want to protect children. And I mean, this is why this has caught fire, right? Because everything is happening so fast. You have AI, you have the question, where do we draw the lines? How do we protect children from anonymous, whatever online? So there is a political attraction to these kinds of restrictions, which is why you need to take it seriously, correct?
- [19:22]
E
Yeah. So, you know, at least when we're talking about, you know, the, the huge rush to ban, usually it's under 16 or under 15 year olds from social media. That started in Australia. And there's a reason why it's picking up so much steam. It's because people are scared about what their kids are experiencing on the Internet. What kind of things are they seeing, are they encountering, you know, God only knows what. And parents, I think, feel that it's something that they have no control over and that's, you know, that's really tempting, that feeling that we can't control anything and that we want to put a little bit more control back in the hands of parents. That's why this is so attractive. But the reason why people need to be a little bit wary about this is, or a lot wary about this is we have this idea of, okay, well, you know, this is just something that affects teenagers. This is something that affects a 12 year old. This isn't something that I, you know, a 30, 40, 50 year old need to worry about. But actually it is, you know, there's a fundamental question, how do you think we determine who is a 14 year old? And that's going to put some barriers for everyone. And you know, some people might be comfortable with that. They might say, you know, I'm okay verifying my age, but are you okay with verifying your age? Perhaps for a government source, maybe not. Are you comfortable verifying your age to a private company that you don't know what they're going to do with the data that might be hacked, that what you do with your verified identity might be released on the Internet or might Be available for sale to buyers, who knows? So, you know, I understand why people are so concerned, but we've always, throughout history have had very good reasons to be concerned or worried about the consequences of speech. Right. Things aren't actually that much different now than they were 50 years ago or 100 years. The technology of course is very different.
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B
Well, yes, that does change the environment a little bit. Your 12 year old was not able to go up to their bedroom and see massive floods of God knows what I mean, porn. Just simply one of them. So let's go back to Australia because people could say, okay, Turkey is an authoritarian regime. Australia is a country with a lot of democratic traditions. Just tell me first of all, what was the digital curfew in Australia? What is it and what was the justification for it?
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E
So Australia passed what's now been seen as landmark legislation to keep, I believe it's under 16, it's either 15 or 16 year olds off social media. So here's the problem. It actually hasn't been worked.
- [22:21]
B
That sounds good. By the way, for a lot of parents. I wanted to stress why that these are not just fringe ideas. I could certainly see that being very, very attractive to a lot of parents and a lot of lawmakers. Okay, so go in. I'm sorry.
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E
Yeah, of course. And I don't deny that parents have reason to be concerned. But the thing is they're already starting to report results. See how effective this legislation has been. Kids are still accessing social media, they're still finding ways People can use VPNs, people can use alternate means. So is it actually working? I don't know that I would say that it is. And so how much privacy are people giving up for something that doesn't actually work in the long run? So that's going on and you know, we also have to be a little bit worried. Australia has been not quite as good on Internet freedom as I would like, despite it being a democratic country. There was actually a pretty worrying incident with Australia's Esafety commissioner a couple years ago. There was a video that was going around on X. There was a stabbing of a bishop a couple years ago in Australia that caught global attention, was really disturbing. They ordered X to blocks that, block that video within Australia, which X did. But then Australia said, but people can still use VPNs to access it. So they were actually attempting to get X to take it down globally for everyone. And that's not something countries are really allowed to do. They're not allowed to set the standards for the global Internet. Unfortunately, they were forced to back off of that. But I wouldn't say that I'm totally comfortable with everything Australia is doing when it comes to the Internet. To start with,
- [24:07]
B
we may be going down a somewhat wonky rabbit hole here, but let's talk about VPNs in terms of what countries can actually control. I mean, it's one thing for, say, the state of Texas to say we're going to have age limits for pornography or whatever, but the fact is, if you use a vpn, does that get around state regulation? Does it get around national regulation? Or have countries like Turkey, Australia, Germany figured out a way to block that as well? How does that work?
- [24:39]
E
Well, so that's the thing. So VPNs can kind of reroute you so it looks like you're accessing information from a different country so you can get around barriers that countries may set. And historically, VPNs on the Internet have been absolutely vital to help people who live behind censorship get access to information. And that's actually something that we're going to be running into when it comes especially to these age gating laws. Because ultimately VPNs are going to present an issue for countries that are trying to enforce age gating rules. So the question is, are they going to take VPN bans to the next step? And I could tell you if they do, they will not be in very good company. If you look at the list of countries that currently ban VPNs, it's some of the world's worst human rights offenders. So that is a really severe step, but it's actually something that people have even been discussing within the UK because the UK has been rolling out this somewhat disastrous Online Safety Act. And the question is, okay, people can get around these rules around online harm, so what do we do? Do we ban people?
- [25:53]
B
Why do you call it what is disastrous about what they're doing in England? Just bring us up to speed on that.
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E
Well, so the UK has been enforcing this Online Safety act, and it's intended to protect their citizens from harmful content on the Internet. And, you know, using age gating, things like that. But you know, we're at the point now where even Wikipedia may be under these restrictions for harmful content. And so is that really such a good law if we.
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B
And who defines harmful. Yeah, well, who defines harmful content?
- [26:28]
E
That's exactly the question. So that's going to be the UK government. It's going to be the people in Ofcom, which is their media regulating body. They're going to be the ones responsible for it. But, you know, the UK is kind of a great test case right now in, I think, disastrous speech rollouts because it's been getting a lot of attention. But I don't know if people actually understand the true breadth of how severely the UK is dealing with speech. So just a few weeks ago, they announced that they're going to be putting out new online regulations even for streamers like Netflix and Amazon prime, where people can report harmful content there, and that there can be fines for streamers that don't do enough to, you know, protect UK audiences against harmful content. Once again, we're talking about harms, but even authority off the Internet. You know, we've seen a lot of people being arrested for, you know, pretty basic. You know, sure, it might be offensive speech, but it's things that most Americans will look at and say, I don't like it. But that seems like pretty basic.
- [27:34]
B
Give me an example. Because. Because that always comes as a shock to realize that in a country like England, they arrest people for things you say, which generally doesn't happen here. So can you give me an example of what's happening there?
- [27:49]
E
You know, right now they're bringing in thousands of people a year for just offensive tweets, you know, not threatening, not offensive tweets. You know, yeah, it's offensive. So if your neighbor says, you know, this is actually something that the UK has been dealing with. They have something called non crime hate incident that they just announced that they're going to change the policing of. But for years, they have been sending police to visit people in their homes. If someone was offended by something they put on the Internet that the government recognized was not criminal, and they'd be keeping a database of people who do non crime hate incidents, which actually it's.
- [28:32]
B
See, this feels like a debate that we were having years ago when we were talking about we need to have speech codes, we need to have hate speech. And what it turned out to be was that, you know, speech, permissible speech, was defined by the most hypersensitive person in the room. If somebody says, I find that to be harmful, and you relabel an opinion you don't like as harmful, then you can ban it or you could shut it down. And I think that there was a failure of imagination about how that could be abused. And this is why it relates to what's happening right now. Because every time you hear Naida, you think, okay, that sounds like a good idea. I'm against hate, I'm against harm, I'm against these Kinds of things. Well, then you have to ask yourself, how much power do you want to give, say, the Orban regime or the Putin regime or the Erdogan regime or the Trump regime, to determine what you can say, not just on the airwaves, but on Twitter, on social media, on Instagram, on Facebook, you know, going after a Netflix show that somebody says that this offends me or this bothers me. And, you know, these standards are very slippery, aren't they?
- [29:47]
E
They are.
- [29:48]
B
And this is the one thing we ought to have learned by now.
- [29:50]
E
And there's another incredible thing that the UK has been doing in the past year or so. So there's this group called Palestine Action. It's a protest group, and they sprayed some paint on military planes. That's illegal. That's vandalism. You can be arrested for that. That's not a problem. But what the UK did was they called this group a prescribed group. And they have been arresting thousands of people just for holding signs that say they disagree with banning this group. And here's the even more incredible part. They have been arresting them under terrorism legislation. So if you hold a sign, a lot of people have been writing the same thing on these signs. It says, I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action. You can get hit with terrorists terror charges just for peacefully holding that sign. And so they've arrested thousands of people for this. And the UK's High Court just actually challenged that ban. They said, no, we're overturning this ban. We're going to give the government time to provide a justification for this, but this is unacceptable. And the UK said, okay, we're going to stop arresting people for this. Just last week, they started again. So it's incredible, you know, terror charges just for holding a sign. And so it's, it's kind of, you know, a test case in a country that doesn't know what to do with upsetting or offensive speech other than regulate it to hell. And it's, you know, it's not a good way to run a country. It's, you know, you keep building and building and growing this censorship machine, and it's going to hit everyone, it's going to hurt everyone, and it doesn't actually solve any of the problems that the government claims it does. I don't think hate has disappeared in the uk. I don't think harmful ideas have disappeared, but it's created a huge censorship machine.
- [31:41]
C
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- [32:40]
F
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- [33:32]
B
I remember writing something about this God so many years ago when American universities were imposing a lot of these bans that you could not say certain things and that blast radius kept getting bigger and bigger. And one of the things that I thought at the time was by suppressing these ideas you don't like, you don't make them go away, you just shove them underground where they're not being debated, they're not being talked about. And now we look around at number of young people who are fascinated by these groiper ideas and the resurgence of some of the real genuine hate speech, not microaggressions that we were banning a few years ago, but this really bad stuff. So we have been A cautionary tale. But let me just play the devil's advocate with you. You describe what's going on in England, how they're arresting people. We don't need to worry about that here in this country because we have the First Amendment right, Sarah. Right. This could never happen here.
- [34:29]
E
We do have the First Amendment, but it's taken some hits lately, you know, fire. We're working to combat that, and we are, you know, working across political spectrum to defend people's rights. But there has been a distinct effort over the past year under Trump administration to chip away, sometimes with a sledgehammer at that First Amendment. So it's been a busy year. And some of the exact things that we're talking about in other countries and criticizing, we're seeing happening here. So with the example of Turkey, for example, we're talking about the end of Internet anonymity and how serious of a threat that is to free speech. What's been happening here in the US The Trump administration has been using these administrative warrants to try to get the information of people who have criticized the government. That's an end to Internet anonymity. That's a huge attack on our rights. And so these are things that we need to be aware of them happening in other countries, not just to say, wow, that's bad, but to be aware of, is it happening here, too? Do we need to caution against that here as well? And there's a fascinating thing that happened in Wales recently that I wrote about. The Welsh Parliament passed this law that gives future government ministers the power to craft legislation to criminalize lying by politicians during an election. And this has been a big thing for years. There's been this huge focus on misinformation. How do we target lies? Listen, I think, for the most part, lies make the world a worse place. I don't disagree with that. But I am also not comfortable with giving the government power to define truth or falsehood. And again, this is something that we have to worry about here in the US we have Donald Trump and Brendan Carr threatening media outlets that are publishing information about the war with Iran that they claim is false and sometimes inaccurately claim is false. And that's scary. We need to be aware of that. This isn't just other countries that have a concern about outlandish policing of alleged misinformation. These are things that can happen here, too.
- [36:45]
B
This strikes me as a fundamental issue here because we live through this period where we were flooded with disinformation, and I think it became rather mainstream that we needed to do whatever possible to fight back against fake news, disinformation, misinformation, how much it's contributed to the toxic political atmosphere. And yet, when you move from just argument or cultural disdain to legislation, the question is, who gets to define what's false? And we're kind of living through that experiment right now. So you have. The Trump administration's been doing a number of things. And by the way, didn't the Biden administration also put a lot of pressure on social media companies as well? Which for a lot of people on the left seemed like a good idea at the time until they realized that, wait, if the government has the power to do that when we're in charge, what happens when the other guy is in charge? So they're doing this about the lies. But also, you mentioned redefining certain kinds of speech as terrorism, and you see that rhetorically in this country. So far, it hasn't manifested, but you can see the impulse, right? If speech you don't like can be redefined as terrorism, that opens up an entire Pandora's box.
- [38:00]
E
Oh, it absolutely does. It's funny, I think we're kind of in the process of opening five different Pandora's boxes at once, which is a little dangerous. But, you know, when it comes to the question of, you know, especially misinformation, you know, you bring up Biden, you bring up Trump, it doesn't. What people need to ask themselves is, all right, imagine the politician you hate most in the world who you think is so wrong and so terrible, there's a non zero chance that person is going to be elected to high office. Do you really want them having that authority? And, you know, there are noble reasons why we should oppose these things, you know, that are a little less partisan. But sometimes we just need to get down to that basic question. Imagine the person you most disagree with having that power. You probably don't think it's such a good idea for that power to exist at all then, right?
- [38:51]
B
Well, exactly. And this has been the failure of imagination. As long as we're in charge, we should have this power, this power, this power. And, you know, there have been voices for, you know, many years saying, well, one of the reasons why in a liberal democracy we restrain power is because you don't want to irrigate power to yourself that the other guy might have and might abuse. And you're seeing that. So talk to me a little bit about domestically, what you see as the biggest threats to free speech. We have this. The models around the world you do have, and I Won't call it a moral panic because that sounds, that's not what I really want to say, but genuine concern about Internet slop and protecting children and everything. But you also have the FCC turning into a cudgel of censorship, libel laws. Just give me some sense of what you see right now. As you mentioned, five Pandora's boxes. What are the Pandora's boxes that are being opened in this country?
- [39:51]
E
Oh, boy. Well, so Pandora's boxes, I think, you know, we've talked a lot in this conversation about the good arguments for the good reasons people have for censorship. Right.
- [40:02]
B
Motivations. Yeah.
- [40:03]
E
And I think a lot of people right now are seeing, you know, good arguments for censorship. And that's what I'm afraid of. They're seeing, you know, there's too many lies, there's too many things that are harmful to children, there's too many things that threaten our country, our national security, things like this. People are always going to have, people in power will always come up with good reasons. Right. For why they need to censor speech. And I worry right now that people are losing a little bit of that reflexive distrust of power and its reasons for censorship. And so, you know, especially when we're talking about protecting ourselves from the harms of the Internet, you know, that can, that doesn't take long until that leads to perhaps no more Internet anonymity or no more privacy. And so that's what I'm afraid of most. I think at this moment, it's that, you know, we're losing a little bit of that distrust, that skepticism of power. I would love to see that.
- [41:03]
B
Maybe we're getting it back again. No, I think we lost it for a while. I said so. I mean, what Trump is doing. And it is interesting, the Trump, Trump's mind is still in 1989, where he thinks that the major networks dominate the media landscape. And so he sicced his FCC on ABC and cbs. But it's been a long time since we've seen, if ever outside of the Nixon administration, who at least was somewhat covert about it, the open threat of government retaliation against someone for speech. So when you have, you know, Brendan Carr coming out and basically saying, you know, that, you know, we're gonna go after a network if you don't do something about the jokes that Jimmy Kimmel is saying, I mean, that strikes me as kind of a, you know, bright light on exactly what you don't wanna have happen in this country. And right now it's just focused on these over the air networks, kind of the legacy media. But if that's the attitude, then they're coming after everybody, aren't they?
- [42:09]
E
Yeah. And, you know, one thing that I found particularly troubling over the past year is that some people have rolled over. A lot of people have rolled over. I mean, we saw some universities roll over, some law firms. Having law firms roll over was, Was truly incredible. But, you know, that's, that's the real risk right now. We have a First Amendment, but the First Amendment only goes so far. If you don't cite your First Amendment rights, if you don't seek to defend them, how much good are they for you, really? If you don't say, these are my rights and I'm going to stand by them and I'm going to push for them. If you don't even make that case at all, then the First Amendment only does so much. So, you know, that's. That's a real risk right now. That.
- [42:54]
B
Well, that. Okay, now this is an important point because the. If, in fact you surrender in advance and engage in self censorship, then the First Amendment becomes a dead letter. Right? If they look at you funny or they threaten you, then the First Amendment's not gonna protect you if you've given in, if you surrendered in advance. Right. I mean, that seems pretty obvious.
- [43:15]
E
Absolutely.
- [43:16]
B
It seems pretty obvious, except to some of the corporate media out there. Okay, I'm sorry, I have a rant coming up here which you do not have to participate in because I agree with you. I think that this was the moment for the people who benefit most from the First Amendment to have pushed back as strongly as possible. And of course, I am referring to tonight's White House Correspondents Dinner. This is when the DC Media elite decide that instead of speaking truth to power, they're gonna get dressed up in their tuxedos and they're gonna hobnob with people from the administration. This year they invited as their special guest Donald Trump, who has been viciously attacking the First Amendment in the press. And apparently CBS News has also invited as its special guest, Pete Hegseth, who is best known in First Amendment circles for kicking the White House press corps out of the Pentagon because they wouldn't do the party line. And so instead of, like, drawing a line and saying this is not normal, they're going to be socializing with them and in order.
- [44:20]
A
But.
- [44:21]
B
And then they feel bad about it. I mean, if you've heard the story, they kind of feel like, yeah, there's a little bit of cognitive dissonance here. So what we're going to do to put lipstick on our appeasement is we're going to have little pocket squares and tote bags with the First Amendment on it. And we're going, and this is our act of subversion, that we're gonna have little wallets and things like that. And I'm sorry, it doesn't strike me as subversive. It strikes me as incredibly pathetic that here are the people who should be fighting for the First Amendment as aggressively as possible, and what are they doing? They're gonna be hanging out with the people who are waging war against the First Amendment, and somehow they think, yes, maybe Donald Trump will see my tote bag or my pocket square and he will do what? I'm just not sure. So I actually think that's been one of the most distressing things over the last year has been the rolling over.
- [45:15]
E
Well, I think the best thing you can do with the text of the First Amendment is cite it when you file a lawsuit to defend your First Amendment rights against government incursions upon them. So that would be my statement.
- [45:27]
B
Well, and the other thing that, you know, the Trump administration has, especially Donald Trump himself, has been using libel laws and slander laws, not necessarily successfully to win the cases, but to. As a brushback pitch. And once again, you know, if there are some people in this country who would like to see that overturned. And by the way, just going back to. We started with the Internet anonymity. You know, one of the great principles of American constitutional law has been that you have the right to engage in anonymous political speech. I mean, this. This is, again, a foundational principle going back to the Federalist Papers. And yet now people are going, yeah, maybe we would be better off if you couldn't post your political comments anonymously on the Internet. Well, that would be a sea change, wouldn't it, in terms of that? But also changing libel. If New York Times versus Sullivan was ever overturned, everything changes. Because the libel laws in England are very different than in the United States, aren't they?
- [46:22]
E
Oh, yes, very much so. And that's, you know, what you mentioned with the libel laws is one of the really troubling thing that's been happening in recent years. You know what they're called? Called slap lawsuits, Strategic lawsuits against public participation. It's a really easy way, even if, you know you can't win. And that's why some states have very helpfully been passing laws against these kind of suits. But it's a way to punish people who are poorer than you. It's a way for the Rich and powerful to use lawfare to silence the not rich and the not powerful so they can't talk about them and can't criticize them. And it's, you know, it's a real, real concern right now the way that wealth can be used as a bludgeoning tool.
- [47:02]
B
This is big. No, this is a really important. I'm glad you mentioned the so called slap lawsuits because one of the realities is that if you're a rich person, you win simply by filing the lawsuit once the meter starts running. So one of the more positive things that's been happening is that one state after another has been passing these anti slapping piece of legislation that actually prevent people from doing that. So in many ways those lawsuits have been below the first Amendment. We're gonna be using different laws, but they have the same effect, right, of intimidating people of people in their heads. And I guess this is the real danger is when you sit down, you know that you're in a bad place if you sit down. You think, this is my opinion, I want to express it. Boy, I shouldn't, I will get in trouble, the government will come after me, I or this rich entity will come after me and it's too risky for me to speak. And that's how free speech dies, right?
- [48:00]
E
Yeah, absolutely.
- [48:01]
B
Out of pure fear and intimidation. You don't have to lock people up.
- [48:05]
E
And that's something I talk about in my book. Cause I talk a lot about China and it's this idea, this mindset that we trap people in, especially in authoritarian countries. But it doesn't need to be authoritarian countries where it is too dangerous for me to even find out where the limits of my speech are. So I will just not say anything at all that could cross a line rather than find out where that line is and discover what the consequences are. Somewhere in China it might be severe, you know, a long time in prison. In the US it might be hundreds of thousands of dollars defending yourself against a lawsuit by someone who's just trying to use the courts to punish you into bankruptcy. And so for some people, they might say, you know what, I'll just delete my Facebook comment. I just won't, you know, say that thing at the town hall meeting. It's just not worth the trouble. And that's what we don't want. Because once you lose that spirit of liberty that people have within them, that trust that they have the right, whether you say a human right, God given right, whatever you want to call it, to say what they think and what they believe, once you Lose that, you kind of lose what powers the First Amendment, what powers people to protect their rights. And so it's so important that we don't let things get to that point, because once people don't even try to talk or care to or want to risk it, the First Amendment can only do so much anyway.
- [49:26]
B
Yeah, I know. And one thing we sort of touched on, I mean, another thing that can happen to you is you can be deported. And this whole notion that if you're in this country and you said something about Palestine or Israel and that they will go through your social media account and they will use that to deport you, which feels like it's first of all a violation of the First Amendment. At least that's what it looks like to me. But also softens people up to the idea that, wait, wait, government agents are looking at what I am saying on social media? This is actually happening here?
- [49:55]
E
Oh, yes, that's definitely happening. And there's a lot there. So first, for those who aren't aware, FIRE is actually suing over that. We're suing over the provisions of the Immigration Nationality act that give Rubio or any Secretary of State the authority to deport people who are legally here. Just because the government doesn't like what they say, that's a problem. The First Amendment doesn't permit that. The First Amendment is a limit on government power. And here's the key thing. A lot of people think, oh, because we're citizens, the First Amendment gives us our rights to speak. No, that's not how it works. You as a human being innately have the right to express yourself. And the First Amendment limits what kind of authority and power the government can use to punish you. So that's what it is. First Amendment doesn't give you something. The First Amendment limits the government. So that's really key to understanding this. And that's what we're talking about. We're talking about deporting people just because they say something that's unpopular that the government doesn't like or thinks is dangerous. The First Amendment limits their authority to do that because that's a government limit on speech here in the United States. But we're really expanding this. You know, there is a proposal that might be going through to force visitors who come here from Europe just to go to Disneyland to hand over five years of social media handles. And it's sending a really bad message about America's commitment to free speech. We're telling visitors we need to know everything you posted on the Internet to decide if you're going to get a letter.
- [51:27]
B
Is that really going to happen? I mean, that seems to cross all kinds of bright red lines.
- [51:33]
E
I think these are lines that we have been pushing already. We've already been requiring international students to hand over their social media handles and to make their accounts public. And that, I think, is a really key thing, because if you have a student from an authoritarian country that's been criticizing their government on a private account, and we're forcing them to make that account public just to come here, we actually might be putting them at risk of retaliation at home. There's a lot of problems here. And I think that it's, you know, even if all of these aren't necessarily a First Amendment question, they're at least a question of our commitment to free speech as a country, how we treat our visitors here. And I'm not comfortable with where we've been heading on that front.
- [52:19]
B
Well, of course, and the great irony is that back in 2023 and 2024, you had people on the right who were actually saying that they were the advocates for free speech, they were against the big tech censorship, they were against all of these things. And then once they got into power, it was this incredible reversal because you don't really sense that, that the Trump folks have a deep commitment to free speech, the speech of people. I mean. So, for example, I mean, you know, and I think that this relates to this, you had six sitting members of Congress who did a video telling members of the armed forces that they did not need, that they should not obey illegal orders, which basically is just reading what the law says. The Trump administration actually tried to arrest and indict them. The federal grand jury didn't go along with it. But people think about that, that they were willing to go after sitting members of Congress for something that they said in a video. If they're willing to do that. Where are we at?
- [53:22]
E
Yeah, I wouldn't say we're in a very good spot. And that's one of those other classic justifications that governments love to look to. It's a national security threat. It's sedition. That should be nothing. Should probably set up a bigger red flag for you that something bad is coming, censorship wise than the government saying there's a national security threat. Because I can't tell you around the world how often a national security threat has just been government critics are saying
- [53:53]
B
things we don't like, which is why wartime is always dangerous. It is in times of war that the First Amendment and all, all of the Bill of rights are most at risk, but particularly now. Sarah McLaughlin, thank you so much for your time. Sarah's work is at fire. You can read her work there or pick up her book about the authoritarians in the academy. Good to have you back again. Thank you so much.
- [54:18]
E
Thanks for having me.
- [54:19]
B
And thank you all for listening to this weekend's episode of to the Contrary podcast. You know why we do this every this week, particularly that we have to remind ourselves that we are not the crazy ones. Thank you.
- [54:47]
C
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